Talking Points is collaborative student project at the University of Michigan with the objective of designing a community-driven urban orientation and contextual information system for non-sighted and sighted users. The system design consists of three components: a social online database, facilitating user-generated content of POI information; a Wifi positioning system; and a mobile device that detects POIs (Points of Interest) and presents the contextual information through either a speech user interface (SUI) or a graphical user interface (GUI).

Research revealed a number of ways to provide serendipitous as well as task-critical information for visually impaired and sighted users as they navigate the university campus on foot. The prototype system meets the following criteria:

• A socially maintained online database containing information about POIs that is accessible via a mobile device
• An interface for non-sighted users that does not rely on visual cues.
• Positioning system that sits on top of an already functioning infrastructure with a scalable algorithm to position the user indoors within a reasonable degree of accuracy.

A mobile device is used to detect points of interest within a city, such as Ann Arbor using GPS coordinates. User generated-content about locations is presented to the user via an accessible audio or visual interface. Information about points of interest is stored in an online database. This information is retrieved by the cellular data connected mobile device when the user is near a POI. The user may position the device in a particular cardinal direction to retrieve data about POIs in front of them. The information for each Talking Point is maintained by the Talking Points community; anyone can add, modify, or delete information for each Talking Point.